Renai and Josh Lambert (Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson)
have recently moved into a new house with their three children. One
morning, Renai begins looking through a family photo album with her son,
Dalton (Ty Simpkins).
He asks why there are no pictures of Josh when he was a child. Renai
reasons that he has always been camera shy. Dalton tells Renai he is
scared of his new room; she calms him down and stacks a few books on a
nearby shelf. When she finds the books lying on the floor later, Renai
tells Dalton to put them back after he looks at them. Dalton claims that
he did not touch them. Sometime later, as Dalton is playing, he hears
noises in the attic and goes to investigate. He steps on an old ladder
to turn on the light, when it breaks, causing Dalton to fall. He starts
screaming after looking at something offscreen in a shadowy corner.
Renai and Josh help him, then tuck him into bed, confident he only took a
minor fall and scared himself. The next day Josh goes to wake Dalton,
but he does not move. They rush him to the hospital where the doctors
say he is in an unexplained coma. Three months later he is still in a coma and they bring him home to care for him.